ABINGTON SCHOOL DISTRICT V. SCHEMPP
Edward L. Schempp, his wife, Sidney, and two of his three children, Roger and Donna, challenged a Pennsylvania law that made Bible reading in the state’s schools compulsory.
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the Lord’s Prayer and Bible reading in public schools in Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 83 S. Ct. 1560, 10 L. Ed. 2d 844. The decision came one year after the Court had struck down, in ENGEL V. VITALE, a stateauthored prayer that was recited by public school students each morning (370 U.S. 421, 82 S. Ct. 1261, 8 L. Ed. 2d 601 [1962]). Engel had opened the floodgates; Schempp ensured that a steady flow of anti-school prayer rulings would continue into the future. Schempp was in many ways a repeat of Engel: the religious practices with which it was concerned were nominally different, but the logic used to find them unconstitutional was the same. This time, the majority went one step further, issuing the first concrete test for determining violations of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
The Schempp ruling involved two cases: its namesake and Murray v. Curlett, 228 Md. 239,
179 A.2d 698 (Md. 1962). The Schempp case concerned a 1949 Pennsylvania law that forced public schools to start each day with a reading of ten Bible verses (24 Pa. Stat. § 15-1516). The law did not specify which version of the Bible should be used—for instance, it could be the Catholic Douay text or the Jewish version of the Old Testament. But local school officials only bought the Protestant King James Version. Teachers ordered students to rise and recite the verses reverently and in unison, or, as in the Abington School District, students in a broadcasting class read the verses over a public-address system. Teachers could be fired for refusing to participate, and pupils occasionally were segregated from others if they did not join in the daily reading.
The Pennsylvania law was challenged by the
Schempps, whose three children also attended
Unitarian Sunday school. In 1958, a special
three-judge federal court heard the case. The
father, Edward L. Schempp, testified that he
objected to parts of the Bible. Leviticus, in par-
ticular, upset him, “where they mention all sorts
of blood sacrifices, uncleanness and leprosy. . . . I
do not want my children believing that God is a
lesser person than a human father.” Although
hardly the first lawsuit on this issue—Bible read-
ing cases in state courts had yielded contradic-
tory rulings since 1910—Schempp was the first
to reach a federal court. The three-judge panel
ruled that the Bible reading statute violated the
First Amendment’s Establishment Clause
(“Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion . . .”) and interfered
with its Free Exercise Clause (“or prohibiting the
free exercise [of religion]”). Local and state offi-
cials immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme
Court.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear Schempp
along with Murray as a consolidated case.Mada-
lyn Murray O’Hair and her 14-year-old son,
William Murray, were atheists. They had chal-
lenged a 1905 Baltimore school board rule
requiring each school day to start with Bible
reading or the Lord’s Prayer (“Our father, who
art in heaven . . .”), or both. An attorney herself,
Murray brought the suit only after protesting to
officials, stirring up media attention, and
encouraging her son to protest in a controversial strike that kept him out of school for 18 days. The suit said the rule transgressed the Establish-
ment Clause by requiring compulsory religious
education and violated the Free Exercise Clause
by discriminating against atheists. The Murrays
originally lost in state courts and on appeal.
When the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral
arguments for the consolidated cases on Febru-
ary 27 and 28, the nation was still reacting to the
previous year’s ruling in Engel. An uproar over
the Engel decision had produced 150 proposals
in Congress to amend the Constitution.
Schempp gave advocates of school prayer a
chance to argue that the Court had been wrong
in Engel, and this they did. Attorneys represent-
ing Pennsylvania and Baltimore officials denied
that Bible reading or prayer had a religious
nature, and claimed that it therefore did not
violate the Establishment Clause—which, in
any event, they maintained, was only designed
to prevent an official state religion. Their true
purpose, argued attorneys, was to keep order
and provide a proper moral climate for
students.
The Court stood by the Engel decision. In an
8–1 decision, it ruled that both Bible reading
and the Lord’s Prayer violated the Establishment
Clause. Justice Tom C. Clark’s majority opinion
differed in a few respects from the previous
year’s ruling: it admonished prayer advocates for
ignoring the law, spelled out in some detail the
precedents involved, and laid out the Court’s
first explicit test for Establishment Clause ques-
tions. Founded on the idea of state neutrality,
this test had a vital standard: any law hoping to
survive the prohibitions of the Establishment
Clause must have “a secular purpose and a pri-
mary effect that neither advances nor inhibits
religion.”
The test clearly spelled out the limits. Study
of the Bible or religion was acceptable, but only
so long as “presented objectively as part of a sec-
ular program of education.” Religious practices
in public school were not allowed under the
FIRST AMENDMENT. “While the Free Exercise
Clause clearly prohibits the use of STATE ACTION
to deny the rights of free exercise to anyone,”
Justice Clark observed, “it has never meant that
a majority could use the machinery of the State
to practice its beliefs.”
Schempp produced three concurring opin-
ions, notably a 74-page opinion by Justice
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN JR. As in Engel, the sole
dissent came from Justice POTTER STEWART.
Again he disagreed with the majority’s emphasis
on the Establishment Clause’s taking precedence
over the Free Exercise Clause. For Stewart, the
key factor was whether the states in the case had
actually coerced students into praying or Bible
reading. He did not think so.
Schempp concluded the initial round of the
Supreme Court’s prayer ban. However, the issue
did not fade from public, political, and religious
concern, and it came before the Supreme Court
two decades later in WALLACE V. JAFFREE, 472
U.S. 38, 105 S. Ct. 2479, 86 L. Ed. 2d 29 (1985) (a
one-minute period of silence for meditation or
prayer had no secular purpose and was created
with religious purpose).
The constitutionality of student-led prayers
made its way to the Supreme Court in Santa Fe
Independent School District v. Doe, 530 U.S. 290,
120 S.Ct. 2266, 147 L.Ed.2d 295 (2000). The
Court held that a Texas public school district
could not let its students lead prayers over the
public-address system before its high school
football games. The school district’s sponsorship
of the public prayers by elected student repre-
sentatives was unconstitutional because the
schools could not coerce anyone to support or
participate in religion. The Establishment Clause barred student prayers as well as those conducted by clergy at school events such asgraduation (LEE V. WEISMAN, 505 U.S. 577, 112S.Ct. 2649, 120 L.Ed.2d 467 [1992]).
FURTHER READINGS
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). 1993. The Establishment Clause and Public Schools. Blanshard, Paul. 1963. Religion and the Schools: The GreatControversy. Boston: Beacon Press.Brown, Steven P., and Cynthia J. Bowling. 2003. “Public Schools and Religious Expression: The Diversity of School Districts’ Policies Regarding Religious Expression.”Journal of Church and State 45 (spring). Davis, Derek H. 2003. “Moments of Silence in America’s Public Schools: Constitutional and Ethical Considerations.”Journal of Church and State 45 (summer).Drakeman, Donald L. 1991. Church-State Constitutional Issues: Making Sense of the Establishment Clause. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.Levy, Leonard W. 1994. The Establishment Clause: Religionand the First Amendment. 2d ed. Charlotte: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
